DBMS > Citus vs. ClickHouse vs. Kinetica vs. NCache vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. ClickHouse vs. Kinetica vs. NCache vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

Open-Source and Enterprise in-memory Key-Value Store

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store
Search engine

Using distributed Lucene

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	0.64
Rank	#236	Overall
	#109	Relational DBMS

Score	0.94
Rank	#195	Overall
	#29	Key-value stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.citusdata.com

clickhouse.com

www.kinetica.com

www.alachisoft.com/ncache

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.kinetica.com

www.alachisoft.com/resources/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Kinetica

Alachisoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2010

2016

2012

2005

2014

Current release

8.1, December 2018

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

7.1, August 2021

5.3.3, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Enterprise Edition available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.
ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.

Implementation language

C++

C, C++

C#, .NET, .NET Core, Java

Server operating systems

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux

Linux
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

partial

Supported data types are Lists, Queues, Hashsets, Dictionary and Counter

yes

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

yes

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

SQL-like query syntax and LINQ for searching the cache. Cache Synchronization with SQL Server using SQL dependency.

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

IDistributedCache
JCache
LINQ
Proprietary native API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
.Net Core
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

yes

user defined functions

support for stored procedures with SQL-Server CLR

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

yes

Notifications

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

key based and custom

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Source-replica replication

yes, with selectable consistency level

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Strong Eventual Consistency over WAN with Conflict Resolution using Bridge Topology

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

optimistic locking and pessimistic locking

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

GPU vRAM or System RAM

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

Access rights for users and roles on table level

Authentication to access the cache via Active Directory/LDAP (possible roles: user, administrator)

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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